1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to network systems, and more particularly, to indirectly controlling target devices on a network.
2. Related Art
Automatic deployment systems automatically deploy operating systems, application-level software and other software to single or multiple target devices in a network, facilitating the enhancement of a large number of target devices from a centralized location. Automatic deployment systems are typically provided in managed system deployment solutions such as the Radia® OS Manager commercially available from Hewlett-Packard, Automated Deployment Services (ADS) commercially available from Microsoft, the Rapid Deployment Pack commercially available from Altiris, Kickstart commercially available from Red Hat, and Jumpstart commercially available from Sun Microsystems.
Conventional automatic deployment systems implement a set of operations or steps to advance target device(s) from an initial state through various intermediate goal states and, ultimately, to a final goal state in which the target device(s) is/are operational and ready for use. This typically involves well-defined goal states and operations being carried out on the target device and recorded in the deployment system to guide the centralized management of the target device from initial to goal state.
It sometimes becomes necessary to carry out an operation that is not included in the normal, well-defined and well-known initial and goal state operations. Such exceptional operations may be required to be carried out either as a temporary substitute for a standard operation or as an operation to be performed in addition to the standard operations. An example of such an exceptional operation could be a software recovery operation for a hardware failure, such as a RAID volume rebuild. Current systems, however, do not efficiently handle such exceptional operations, often requiring personnel to manually make the desired changes on individual target devices.